Friday, March 10, 2017

SCIENTOLOGY SMELLS ONE OF ITS OWN IN DONALD TRUMP

Tom De Vocht, a former high-ranking Scientologist who once had the ear of Grand WizardHigh Sparrow head of the church David Miscavige, thinks Donald Trump and Mr. Miscavige might very well be brothers with different mothers, given what a pair of loudmouthed schnooks they are:

As of November 2015, despite regularly invoking the 9/11 tragedy on the campaign trail, Trump’s Donald J. Trump Foundation—the philanthropic arm of the Trump Organization—had made only one donation to a 9/11-related charity, according to IRS records obtained by The Smoking Gun. Trump’s foundation donated $1,000 to the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project: an initiative co-founded by Tom Cruise that allowed 9/11 firefighters to freely employ Scientology’s “Purification Rundown,” a detoxification method devised by L. Ron Hubbard that members of the medical community have described as “quackery” and “scientifically bereft.”

“I am aware of it,” De Vocht says of the program, which was established in 2003. “That was all a PR thing. Miscavige had to do something 9/11-related.”

But when I mention the Trump foundation’s donation to the organization, he is shocked: “Are you kidding me? I didn’t know that! That’s funny.”

While De Vocht says that he never heard the Trump name uttered in connection to Scientology—Trump’s donation also came in 2006, one year after De Vocht left the church—he attests to there being many similarities between Donald Trump and David Miscavige.

“They are two peas in a pod, I tell ya, with regards to spewing at the mouth and lying constantly. There’s a definite similarity between those two guys. It’s scary,” he says.

“The lying is part of believing in himself,” De Vocht adds of Trump. “Just take the inauguration and lying about the number of people there—that’s something that Miscavige totally did, too.”

Obviously, correlation doesn’t equal causation or anything; without some serious inquiries of the type that could put a lot of mostly undeserving people in the hot seat, we’ll never know the extent of Trump’s relationship to the Church Of Scientology. But what we do know is that they are definitelywithinhisorbit, and that, while the Moral Majority that supports Trump appear diametrically opposed to Scientology’s influence, given how the interests of Republican Jesus and Xenu so closely align, it’s hard not to believe that that opposition is more over market share than morality.

Long time Scientology blogger Tony Ortega spoke with former church spokesman Mike Rinder about whether and how Trump might be swayed by their influence, who had this to say on the matter:

"Generally, Republicans are helpful to Scientology,” he says. “The Christian Right has a lot of influence. They may hate Scientology, but they will do a lot to protect from any erosion of First Amendment protections. They worry that if Scientology gets attacked or loses its tax-exempt status, then it will be the Christian Scientists or Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons next, and then their denominations. But I do not know how much influence they have with Trump. He seems wholly uninfluenced by anything other than money and his ego. So, perhaps they won’t have much say and the angle could be to generate revenue for the Treasury by revoking Scientology’s tax exempt status. Trump is so unpredictable…it’s impossible to tell what he might do and whether his is a good or bad administration for seeking government action against Scientology."

And then there’s the question of tactics. Scientology wrote the book on how to browbeat both the public and the government into submission through a combination of rhetorical strategy and an onslaught of litigation against “suppressive persons,” be they people who badmouth the Church all the way up to federal agencies who won’t let them get away with murder. Trump, the Republican Party, and the Moral Majority have all clearly borrowed heavily from that book, from Trump University’s Dianetics-esque grift package to Betsy DeVos’ apparent desire to turn public schools into a quasi-religious pyramid scheme to guys like pastor Kevin “Kill The Gays” Swanson harassing YouTube into shutting down Right Wing Watch back at the beginning of the election after POTUS-elect hopefuls appeared at one of his conferences.

I wonder how many of them have read “Bell Curve” author and “Make Scientific Racism Great Again” advocate Charles Murray’s latest book since its first right-wing think-tank debutante parade in Spring 2015? Wayback Machine time, y’all!

“Murray says his book grew out of frustration over the experience of a friend, who he describes as an honest businessman unjustly harassed by arrogant federal bureaucrats. Murray’s solution is to have one or a few anti-government billionaires kick in to create “The Madison Fund,” a legal group that would flood the government with lawsuits challenging the enforcement of regulations they deem unnecessary...That is exactly the strategy used by the Church of Scientology in its long-running war on the Internal Revenue Service. Murray doesn’t credit Scientology leader David Miscavige, but it sure seems like he should. […]

Murray’s plan includes another strategy used by the Church of Scientology. Murray says the Madison Fund will wage public relations campaigns to ridicule government regulations and the officials enforcing them. Wright documents that Scientology supplemented its legal war on the IRS with ads featuring celebrities, including non-Scientologists, who had been audited or otherwise had tangled with the IRS.

The legal war waged by Scientology worked, winning the church official recognition as a tax-exempt religion and all the legal protections that came with it when the IRS caved. Wright says that IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg “had to balance the longing on the part of some of his executives to destroy the church against the need to keep his resources, both human and financial, from being sucked into the black hole that Scientology had created.”

At least Scientology officials had just one goal – official recognition — and backed off once they won that battle. In contrast, Murray envisions an ongoing, wide-ranging, black-hole-creating campaign that he openly admits is an end-run around the democratic process, which has failed to produce the radical restrictions in government that libertarians are looking for.”

It would appear by all accounts that the Church Of Scientology, the Republican Party, and The Moral Majority all have their man. Once they collectively figure that out, we’re in deep shit.